Basic notes:

Warp Yarn: Medium Lilac, Mandarin Petit, 100% Egyptian cotton, produced in Norway.  50g skeins ~180m/skein.  Wash cold, air dry.  Iron 150dC max.  18 wraps/inch.  Z plied, S twist.  7-ply.  Color lot: 5226 5926.

Weft Yarn: Light Lilac, Wildflower DK, Plymouth, 51% cotton, 49% acrylic, made in Holland.  50g skeins ~137 yds/skein.  Other stats same.  Color lot 50 105.

Jorgensen, Lise Bender.  "Scandinavia, AD 400-1000."  The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, vol 1.  David Jenkins, editor.  Cambridge University Press.  2003.

(Note: obviously anything at only 18 wpi is not going to produce "fine" fabric, but I was given a lot of this yarn, so I worked with what I had.  I figure the larger size will make it easier to analyze the weave structure.)

Okay, here's the step by step with pictures, for Madhavi especially.

This is called a warping board.  What's happening here, is that I'm winding the yarn shown in skeins on the board in this pattern, which I've measured to be 5.5 yards – the limit of this particular board.  (I need a longer board; fortunately you can see that if I just make new horizontal pieces and insert my dowels in, I can reuse the side pieces.)  I have three skeins wrapped on the board, and will end up using eight skeins total for this warp.

The little yellow ties are to keep the warp from tangling as I move it to the loom.  A lot of the rather mystifying bits are merely tricks to keep the warp from tangling.  This not-fine yarn is not so much a problem – but imagine if I was using the very fine orange yarn in the previous post?  Actually, let's not.  :D

Here's my left hand, having just taken that lower left loop off the dowel, cut the loop (that's one end of my fabric, those cut ends) and knotted the warp to keep the ends together.

Still working with the warping board.  It's propped on the front beam of the loom.  Know how to chain parachute ropes?  Same idea.  Just trying to keep all the strands organized.

Okay, I've jumped ahead a couple of baby steps, since I didn't have a hand to hold the camera.  Here you see multiple warp chains made, and the chains are wrapped around the front beam of the loom.  The cross end (the top end of the warping board, where the yarn was wrapped in sort of a figure eight shape) has also been cut open, and all those ends (276) of them have been fished through that comb-thingy (called a reed, mounted in the beater).  Each slot in the reed currently holds two ends.  I'm going to change that at the edges, so that they're firmer, by moving a couple of threads in on each side, making the edge denser.

Let's go around the back side of the loom to see what it looks like.

Okay, so in the background of this picture you see the chains wrapped around the front beam.  The new purple warp is sleyed through the slots of the reed, and temporarily tied on the back side (cat protection).  What's all this other stuff in the heddles?

(more vocab:  The white vertical strings tied in the frames of the harnesses are called heddles.  These are just string, knotted to all be the same length, and to have a little hole in the middle.  That's where the warp threads go through, one per heddle.  Those are extra heddles piled up on the sides.  The frames go up and down when I press the foot pedals, which creates different places to throw the shuttle, and the combination of stringing the heddles different ways and pressing the pedals to select combinations of harnesses is what gives you crazy amounts of variation.  600 weaves in my four-harness loom manual.)